Small business owners are an overworked lot. A survey conducted by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that nearly a quarter of American small business owners worked at least 60 hours each week, while another third of the population worked over 50 works. Overworked small business owners have little time to spare to look for good employees who can help free up their time. Not only that, an overworked business owner also has little time to invest in building and scaling up their business.
One way to tackle this issue is with outsourcing. This strategy however is not too different from hiring an employee since businesses need to spend a lot of time in finding a good company to outsource to. An alternative that works better is marketing automation. Technology tools for marketing automation make it easier for businesses to replace a lot of operational tasks with automated processes. For instance, a marketing automation tool like GetResponse would help you with processes like
l Email customers based on their buying habits
l Reach out to customers who have products abandoned in their cart
l Upsell products based on purchasing history
l Offer discounts or request reviews based on their NPS score
l Reach out to inactive customers to trigger buying activity
A lot of work involved in these processes above is operational in nature and business owners spend an inordinate amount of time staying in touch with customers, engaging them and making sales. By automating this process, business owners free up their time to work on more critical aspects of growing their business like finding new customers or opening new locations. This is how one must go about it.
Find Repetitive Tasks That Can Be Replicated
Marketing automation tools are only as effective as how you want them to be. The first step in automating your marketing operation is identifying the various repetitive tasks in your routine. This could be anything from collating the sales numbers from the previous day and consolidating them into a spreadsheet, identifying new customers to your business and adding them to your newsletter, building a list of product returns and reaching out to these customers or emailing your loyal subscribers about the new arrivals in your store. Create a spreadsheet of these various tasks to automate.
Translate This Into Workflows
The next step in automating the processes is to translate the repetitive tasks you have identified into workflows that can be fed to an automation tool. For instance, the workflow for collating sales numbers from previous day’s data would look something like this:
If time is 6:00 AM,
Then pull ‘total sales’ from the Sales spreadsheet
And then add this to the Daily Sales spreadsheet
You can similarly build workflows for every other task you want automated.
Feed These Workflows Into Your Tool
The last and final step in the process is to feed these workflows into your marketing automation tool. Most modern automation tools provide users with an easy to use drag-and-drop tool that may be used to build automation workflows.
While the process itself is simple, marketing automation can be extremely powerful and can free up several hours of the business owners’ time each week. Business owners may now be in a better position to hire employees, find agencies to outsource other areas of business to, and expand business.
Are you a business owner who has benefited from marketing automation? Share your experience with us in the comments.